[2021] Do you wish to see +/- 1 Tier Only

You have summoned me. Not sure to what end though.

Regards,

Ev1n

Since I work at WG, you have shared this feedback with WG.

However, please understand that the current 59 replies constitute only an extremely tiny fraction of the roughly 60000 players who were sailing on the NA server yesterday. We can't make objective decisions about the game based on this.

Since it doesn't matter what i say and any communications from my side that do not fit into your demand are discarded as untrue, then why do you guys tag me in this?

I'm trying to give you guys some understanding of how this game still is and still will be operating in the next few years, despite the forums saying its dying since release (which it is not). However, there is a method to all this madness that we need to follow. Democracy is not part of that method and there are many examples of games that tried that with their core design and died.

We do. There is actually a survey that appears to a random sample of the audience after a a battle and asks exactly that.

Aside from the fact that a lot of people click it away, because they can't be bothered with giving us data (not surprising though - we all know it and we all do it), you can probably guess what the correlation is. The people who lost say that the experience was bad and the people who won say it was good.

Before you say we should specify the questions - we do that too, just via email. The problem with that is that its like voting in elections - people do not understand the context of their choice. Many of you will say "omg learn to play u nub" and with the same breath you ask that we poll them on complicated technical design issues. Sure, we could do that, but they will choose the option that sounds nicer and will have no idea about the consequences of that choice. This is a common theme for us and most developers when working with large audiences.

Instead, we choose to ask semi-detailed and open questions, to get a more generalized picture showing different areas of the game experience. Then we can analyze how people behave in that area of the game and whether there are any abnormal patterns - if a piece of the game causes them to feel negative emotions, then they will adopt behaviors to mitigate that. A simple example was a recent post here on NA with data pulled from Maple Leaf that showed alleged class popularity changes after the changes to rocket planes.

This is why we encourage everyone to play the PT whenever they can and to answer all the surveys we send, because this is what helps us the most. It contributes your voice to a representative pool of data backed by scientific method. Not through social media polls - nowadays these get people elected president, which i find absurd. The approach also has a downside though - the inertia inherent to gathering a representative pool of data, then validating and analyzing it, then finding a solution, then putting it into the next available build branch, means that it takes time before we react (to anything but critical issues). This lag is still better than implementing based on the result of a simple poll and rolling the dice to see if the game dies.

I'm obviously simplifying a lot of this, but the core of the matter is actually not whether we should or shouldn't ask players about +1 MM, but whether +1 MM fixes the problem and what that problem actually is. When analyzing this it turns out (because we've been having this discussion for years) that there isn't ONE big problem - there are many small balance problems specific to the ways players play the game, which ships they have, which modes they play, how good they are and a lot of other factors. They all call this problem "balans", but there is also no need for a big solution with a lot of risk, when smaller solutions to those individual problems are safer. It was already stated in the thread by a few people that implementing this would also remove some positive aspects of their experience and we need to avoid that.

Maybe in the end we WILL come to the conclusion that +1MM addresses the majority of the issues and that it is actually worth the risk, but that won't be determined by this poll, or by anyone on Twitter.

Yes, this is generally correct and has an example of what i meant above. "Battleship, a class that up tiers by far the worst of the classes" is a problem statement that is more specific than "balans is bad" and has different implications and solutions, which do not necessarily involve +1 MM.

In closing - We do our best to address the issues that we see popping up and we do need your feedback. We drone on and on about that in our streams, but we also say we need it to be constructive. "We need you to give us +1MM" is not constructive. Instead, tell us what the problem is, make it as specific as you can, tell us or show us how it affects your game experience. If there are enough people with similar problems and patterns, we will look for a solution.

Also, let me know if you want me to explain the dev process regularly in some form - i can make time for that if there are people willing to listen.

Best,

Ev

Some interesting comments were posted, so I'll do my best to respond. Thank you for being civil, guys.

This is very important to understand, but also very obviously not what people want to hear. The reality is that even if all 60k active players (on NA only) provided their feedback to us, we would have to pick and choose what to act on, because there are only a few hundred of us in the Ships team and most are busy with jobs that are not QA and not balance. We need to look at feedback (or information flow in general) in categories to make it manageable.

We do still read qualitative feedback, because sometimes it allows us to apply additional context to a data trend that we see. Unfortunately this doesn't work the other way around - we can't extrapolate trends from a small amount of qualitative statements, because each such statement may be related to any number of trends, which might be different for any player making the statement.

This is why I wrote that it's best if you tell us what's wrong, but in the most specific way possible (meaning that saying "after the update i feel like i have no more tools against DDs due to the rocket plane changes, so i don't play CVs any more" is better than saying "CVs are crap now"). This is a statement that makes it much easier to categorize with other similar statements, so that we can look for a behavioral trend there.

The point though is that people pay or practice many years to get educated in game design to be able to produce good answers to design problems. As i already wrote - we can't allow design by democracy in our product and equally we can't just take anyone's word for it, that their solution is the best. Sometimes a presented solution sounds good and we will try to back it up with data and experiments. Sometimes we know it's not a good idea, because we have data that says so, or because we do not yet have data that says otherwise.

I learned that myself in all the years since pre-alpha build 0.1.2, when i joined as an Associate Producer. In my first year i wrote many suggestions to the dev team, which i though were great and should be implemented. Convoy Mode was one such suggestion and i thought it was an amazing idea until we tested it in alpha and it turned out that it didn't work, for the simple reason that you can't stop a shell in flight, which generally invalidates the concept of protecting anything that is not player-controlled. We're periodically testing Convoys to this day, looking for a way to make it work and we probably will one day. I was just naive and thought i was a good designer back then. Turned out game design was a science i hadn't studied enough of yet. :)

You're absolutely right, but this is what i was referring to just above. If the example with high latency and server desync happened once then that's fine. Obviously, for your experience in that battle it's bad, but you'll likely survive it - i.e. you won't leave the game just because that one thing happened. However, if that keeps happening over and over to you and players in your area, or happens once to a large group of players, then we will see that data trend. This is obviously a specific example, because latency is generally a critical indicator we track for the servers, so if the hamster even bats an eye we will likely know about it, but the principle applies the same way to other examples. We look for markers that allow us to box in a correlation. After that, if we find a few, we usually ask our supertesters or just design a specific survey and send it to a sample of the audience.

We have a strike team within development called "Fresh Random" who are constantly working only on that - trying to prevent randoms from becoming so monotonous that people would start leaving the game over it. Some of their work ends up contributing to event modes like Battle of the Beasts, but the bulk of their time has been spent on subs for a while now.

Yes, this is what game loops do - they give you a challenge and ask you to adapt and overcome (learn to play). Challenge by definition implies some level of skill or effort you have to acquire to fulfill the task, or an advantage your opponent has over you. The game is full of them and, as was also stated at the beginning of this thread, the game also uses negative reinforcement to drive users to progress. It's by design that the game allows for some interactions to be seemingly unfair.

Our main task in all of this is to make sure that there aren't so many negative experiences which are not balanced by positive ones, that people start leaving the game because of them (in each specific category and area of the game).

Thank you! I appreciate your thoughtful response.

I also get what you're saying about explaining fundamentals and this is definitely a challenge, because i obviously have limited bandwidth and capability to do so. In some areas I also won't be able to go deep into details, because they do contain trade secrets that we are simply unwilling to share with the public and our competitors. It would be bad for business if everyone knew how to cook the perfect sauce, even though i understand that for players competition in the genre and variety of game choices is obviously better.

I'll do my best to explain what I can and what i know best, which is generally audience behaviors, user-experience aspects and production processes. Just for context, my background is in teaching and in criminology (with a focus on online behaviors), which is the study of why large groups of people do bad things (or why bad things happen to or inside of them) and most of my time at WG I spent as a producer. I also have relatively limited time for writing this stuff, but we'll try to find a good format for it.

Why are you even posting in this thread, if you're not interested in what i have to say?

Also have you actually read those complaints on that page? Some of them are interesting, like people contesting getting banned for breaking the EULA.

Not saying the services of BBB are bad by any stretch - people should absolutely use it if they feel they need arbitration.

Have a good weekend - long or otherwise. Stay safe, don't blow yourselves up. I'll be back on the forums in a few days.

Again, thank you for remaining civil.

Regards,

Ev